August 6, 2000

For Better or WorseJerry Oppenheimer's view of the Clintons' marriage.

By EMILY EAKIN

STATE OF A UNION
Inside the Complex Marriage
of Bill and Hillary Clinton. By Jerry Oppenheimer.
Illustrated. 312 pp. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. $25.

ou've got to feel just a little bit sorry for Jerry Oppenheimer. Sure, his book, which purports to be a definitive account of the Clinton marriage, is clicking its way to best sellerdom. But his current 15 minutes has the earmarks of a desperate publicity stunt. Thanks to its dubious revelation of an anti-Semitic slur allegedly directed by Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign worker 26 years ago, ''State of a Union'' hit the ground running. While reporters interviewed the supposed victim of Mrs. Clinton's rage, and columnists debated the effect of her ''Jewish problem'' on her Senate campaign, the first lady felt compelled to call a Sunday afternoon news conference at her home and issue a teary denial. The president took time out from the Middle East talks at Camp David to phone The Daily News in New York and add his own rebuttal.

It's unclear how the testimony of the nation's most famously idiosyncratic exegete on questions of fact versus fiction was expected to clarify the issue. But in the end, it didn't matter. Oppenheimer's story began unraveling on its own. His principal source, Paul Fray, was an Arkansas political consultant who managed Bill Clinton's unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 1974, and Fray's claim that in a violent argument the night the returns came in, Hillary used a profanity-ridden anti-Semitic slur is clearly meant to be Oppenheimer's smoking gun. He devotes an entire chapter -- Hillary Uses the 'J' Word'' -- to the incident, determined that it should be seen not as isolated anomaly but as proof of entrenched prejudice lurking in the heart of a woman who would pass herself off to the world as unfalteringly P.C. ''Unfortunately,'' Oppenheimer writes ominously, ''this was neither the first nor the last time Hillary would use such a slur.'' By way of evidence, he cites a history of anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiment in the Rodham family (Hillary's mother had a Jewish stepfather she didn't like) and a video produced by an anti-Clinton group in which Larry Patterson, the former Arkansas state trooper whose reports of Bill Clinton's sexual peccadilloes were published in The American Spectator in 1994, testifies that Bill and Hillary used to hurl anti-Semitic slurs at each other.

By now, Fray's account looks highly suspect. His nearest Jewish ancestor, it turns out, was not his father, as Oppenheimer had it, but a paternal great-grandmother. More damning, though Fray and his wife have been enthusiastic contributors to Clinton books and articles over the years, they had, inexplicably, never mentioned this incident to any other reporter. Neil McDonald, a campaign worker Oppenheimer places in the room where the exchange allegedly took place, now says that he was actually just outside the door.

With his star witness suffering credibility problems, his revelations -- and perhaps his book -- are doomed to a short shelf life. After all, ''State of a Union'' arrives very late in the day. Its principals have been each -- separately, together, from the right, from the left -- exhaustively characterized. Arguably we know more about the Clintons' childhood homes, parents' dispositions, Western civ teachers, academic achievements, eating habits, wardrobes, hairdos, body parts and amorous involvements than those of any other public couple in history. And yet, for all these mountains of facts, pages of analysis and endless frames of film, no one has been able to explain satisfactorily what keeps the Clintons together, how much love and passion there is in their marriage or why, apparently, we all so desperately want to know. Oppenheimer comes no closer to answering these questions than anybody else. The mystery is why he bothered to try.

A veteran writer of unauthorized celebrity biographies, Oppenheimer is good at digging up dirt and molding it into the kind of unsparingly nasty page turner that is both titillating and embarrassing to read. But unlike his flayings of Ethel Kennedy, Barbara Walters and Martha Stewart, his dismemberment of Bill and Hillary Clinton feels halfhearted. It may be to his credit that ''State of a Union'' lacks an obvious ideological agenda, but that makes his book feel random and unfocused, its insights shopworn, its broadsides motivated less by principle or politics than a baser and mostly unsuccessful desire for novelty at any cost.

After establishing early on that Hillary was ''the cool logician, the strategist, the pragmatist, impatient with high-flung rhetoric, able to cut through the guff'' while Bill was ''the emotional reactor, the wild man, all intuition and gut and razzle-dazzle'' and that what they saw in each other was ''the possibility of a dream fulfilled -- and the dream was never less than the presidency,'' Oppenheimer has little to add on the subject of the Clinton marriage. Instead, he makes detours away from it, seeking fresh delectation in Scranton, Pa., where Hillary's great-aunt Anna May kept a hotel (''While there's no evidence on record that Hillary's great-aunt by marriage was a madam, it's probable that Rodham's Hotel offered a haven for ladies of the evening and their clientele''), in Hillary's father's unremarkable and unsuccessful race for Chicago alderman in 1947 (''Oddly, in all of her years in the political arena, Hillary has never publicly discussed her father's venture into politics'') and in a 21-year-old college graduate named Marla Crider who worked on Bill's 1974 Congressional campaign and was romantically involved with him until Hillary -- Bill's official girlfriend back in Washington -- showed up and put an end to the affair. (Marla was the first Monica, it is insinuated.) It is telling that in ''State of a Union,'' Hillary's physical appearance passes for a major theme. Oppenheimer never misses an opportunity to remark on the first lady's lack of conventional female charms and devotes two pages to a Life magazine photo spread on the young Arkansas governor and his wife that never appeared, apparently because Hillary was deemed insufficiently photogenic.

While die-hard Clinton trivia collectors might thrill to discover that Bill is a lousy driver, or that Norman Mailer apparently lost his virginity in the brothels of Scranton, the Rodham family seat, for the rest of the nation it is safe to say that there is less to be learned about the first couple in ''State of a Union'' than there is in a single episode of ''Survivor.''